I'm a professional bartender - I bartend for private parties, events, weddings, ragers, bar mitzvahs, whatever you got...
In this blog, I talk about my experiences behind the bar, bartending tips and tricks, great drinks, alcohol reviews and more. ENJOY!

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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Sound Smart When Ordering Your Drink

There have been plenty of times when I’ve heard someone order
a drink and one of two (or two of two) things have happened:

1)A person orders a martini or whiskey drink.The bartender asks them certain specifications
of how they want it.They turn silent
with confusion.

2)A person orders a martini or whiskey drink with
their specifications of how they want it.But their specifications don’t make sense or aren’t even real terms and
the bartender has to ask a bunch of questions to figure out what that person
means.

In either case, one word most likely passes through the
mind of the bartender and possible onlookers: DUMBASS.

I don’t want this to happen to you and neither does your
friendly neighborhood Spiderman.I mean bartender.So you can sound like you know what the f*ck
is up when you’re ordering at the bar, I have gone over a bunch of terms that are
good to know, especially if you are going for a martini or whiskey drink. Ready?

A martini classically contains gin.As of late however, I have made ten times
more martinis with vodka.Even though vodka
martinis are way more popular these days, you still need to specify that you
want a vodka martini vs a normal martini with gin.Last, please order it with a good gin or
vodka. Otherwise it’s just gross.

I heard someone ask for their bourbon “straight up” one
night.This can be an unclear order to
the bartender and spurred me to include this paragraph. Straight up generally
means chilled and served in a martini glass without ice, hence the “up” part,
because the alcohol is high up above the table/bar due to the shape of the
martini glass.Another word for “straight
up” is just “up”. One generally doesn’t serve
non-chilled alcohol in a martini glass or “up”.

Another set of terms has to do with having your drink in
a rocks glass (a short cup made of glass) opposed to a martini glass.If you want your Jack Daniels in a rocks glass
with ice, you would say “on the rocks”.If
you want the bartender to just pour you some Jack in a glass and give it to you
with no ice, you would say that you want your Jack “neat” or “straight”.This is distinct, however, from “straight up”,
which would be chilled Jack Daniels in a martini glass, which isn’t really a
thing unless you add a few things to make it a Manhattan.With me so far?

One time a girl ordered a dirty vodka martini from me.I made the martini with the vodka she asked
for and served it to her.She took a sip
and said, “You didn’t make this right.There’s
too much vermouth in here.”I’ve decided
to make this girl’s story into a cautionary tale.A lot of bartenders, including myself, won’t
put any dry vermouth in a dirty martini because you just can’t taste the
difference. Plus most people think that dry vermouth is gross. Read on for the various martini specifications…

There are a bunch of other terms for quantities of
vermouth in your martini or Manhattan. Like I mentioned above, a dirty martini will
often have olive juice and no dry vermouth. A dry martini has a tiny tiny
splash, like a few drops, of dry vermouth.Extra dry will have none at all. Then there is a perfect martini or
perfect Manhattan, which has equal parts sweet and dry vermouth.

The last term that we’re going to cover here is “with a
twist”.This means that the drink calls
for a lemon, lime or orange rind, commonly lemon, twisted up, quickly rubbed
over the rim of the glass and then dropped in the glass.

OK all, that’s all I have on this topic for now, so go
out to a bar, get drunk and sound smart!

David

P.S., You can skip the bar all together and get crunk at home. All without leaving the house. Drizly delivers your booze to your door. In an hour. It's the only way that I shop for alcohol these days.